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Busy Drive Handling Made Easy

by Mr_T on 12-01-2011 12:58 AM - last edited on 12-01-2011 01:04 AM

The robotic arm in your tape library is responsible for maintaining a map of where all of its media is located.  It knows what tapes reside in storage slots, mail slots, the arm's gripper, and each tape drive.  For the media that is mounted in a drive, the arm also knows the storage slot from which it came.  It's true for physical tape libraries like HP's ESL, EML, and MSL products as well as appliances that emulate tape libraries like HP's D2D StoreOnce and Virtual Library Systems.

 

Consider the default behavior enumerated in this example:

 

  1. A new backup starts after recovering from a crash of your Cell Manager machine.
  2. The Backup Media Agent (BMA) tells the Utility Media Agent (UMA) to fetch a tape from storage slot 10 and mount it in drive 2.
  3. The robotic arm informs UMA that it cannot satisfy the tape mount because drive 2 already has a tape in it.
  4. The session aborts.

So what?  So what if I told you that one simple change in your Data Protector library properties can leverage the robot's inventory information to no longer abort backup sessions when UMA unexpectedly encounters a tape left behind in a tape drive that it wishes to load with a new tape.

 

Using your context drop-down, select Devices & Media.

 

Scoping Pane - Devices & Media

 

In the scoping pane (left side) with your environment tree, expand Devices, right-click your library, and select Properties ...

 

Library Properties

 

Here's where we get down to business.  In the results pane (right side), select the Control tab.  Look for the Busy drive handling section.  Note that the default is Abort.  Using the drop-down menu, change the parameter from Abort to Eject medium.

 

Eject Medium vs. Abort

 

Don't forget to apply your changes!

 

With our new setting for busy drive handling, let's revisit the train wreck in my previous example.  What will be different this time?

 

  1. A new backup starts after recovering from a crash of your Cell Manager machine.
  2. The Backup Media Agent (BMA) tells the Utility Media Agent (UMA) to fetch a tape from storage slot 10 and mount it in drive 2.
  3. The robotic arm informs UMA that it cannot satisfy the tape mount because drive 2 already has a tape in it.
  4. UMA instructs the robot to dismount the tape in drive 2 and return it to the storage slot from whence it came.
  5. UMA then queues a command to mount the tape from storage slot 10 in the freshly-emptied drive 2.
  6. The tape load succeeds, and your backup proceeds as usual.

Your backup completes successfully, your slumber is uninterrupted by a call from tech support, and you are once again the hero of enterprise backup and recovery -- a giant among your peers.  The only thing missing is a cape!  (And the ability to fly.)

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by Technical Support Services(anon) on 12-01-2011 10:40 AM
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A nice blog to handle technical errors related to bus drive and made it easy.

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by ChadV(anon) on 12-01-2011 02:46 PM
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If the device is already in use, by an already running job, will the newly started session interrupt the one that is running or will it queue up and wait for it to finish? Just wanted to make sure that this did not give it the liberty to interrupt already running backups.

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by Mr_T on 12-08-2011 02:43 AM
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Devices locked by currently running backups will not be interrupted.  Only if a tape is encountered in an unlocked drive will the unload take place.

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